Edvard Munch, “The Scream,” 1895
© 2012 The Munch Museum/The Munch-Ellingsen Group/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
The short answer to the tantalizing question in the above headline is: “I don’t know.”
But the Museum of Modern Art’s announcement to Carol Vogel of the NY Times yesterday (and to the rest of us scribes today) raises the obvious question as to whether this modern-art icon, sold for $119.92 million last May at Sotheby’s (an auction record for any work of art), will eventually come back to MoMA as a promised gift or bequest. For now, it will arrive on Oct. 24 in MoMA’s painting and sculpture galleries for a six-month stint. It will be shown alongside several Munch prints owned by MoMA.
This morning, I shot off the obvious question (and a few others) to MoMA’s press office and got the expected non-answers:
Q: Might “The Scream” eventually come to MoMA as a promised gift? Have there been any discussions along those lines?
A: The discussion with the lender has only involved this six-month loan.Q: Is there talk of its being shown at other museums after MoMA?
A: MoMA is not involved in any such discussions.
Q: Is it now owned by a single private collector and was he/she the purchaser at Sotheby’s?
A: The lender has requested to remain anonymous, so we have to adhere to that request.
It’s no secret, of course, that last July the Wall Street Journal‘s Kelly Crow identified Leon Black as the buyer. At the time, Kelly stated that she had confirmed her scoop with “several people close to the collector [Black].” It’s interesting to note that even though the Times has a written policy (scroll to “Other People’s Reporting”) requiring its reporters to credit outside journalists for information used in Times articles, Vogel did not credit the WSJ for fingering Black, who is founder, chairman, and CEO of Apollo Global Management, an alternative asset management firm.
Instead, Vogel wrote this (in the article linked at the top):
The New York financier Leon Black is said [by whom???] to have been the buyer of the pastel at Sotheby’s, but nobody—including Mr. Black himself, officials at Sotheby’s or Mr. [Glenn] Lowry [MoMA’s director]—would confirm that he was the one lending the painting to MoMA.
To the best of my knowledge, this is the first time that the Times has mentioned Black as the possible buyer. In response to my own queries this morning, MoMA would neither confirm nor deny Black’s ownership. Black sits on the boards of both MoMA and the Metropolitan Museum.
The 1895 pastel-on-board, loaned to MoMA by an unidentified “private collector,” is the only one of the four versions of “The Scream” to remain in private hands.
“From what we have been able to determine thus far,” MoMA told me, “this pastel of ‘The Scream’ has not been displayed in a U.S. museum, except at the National Gallery of Art in the early 1990s.” In its major 2006 retrospective, Edvard Munch: The Modern Life of the Soul, MoMA displayed two lithographs of “The Scream,” both made in 1895 (the same year as the pastel), but not the original pastel or paintings of the same subject.